He served on the board of directors of the World Federalist Association, has chaired its Policy and Issues Commission, and is President of the Minnesota chapter of Citizens for Global Solutions.
This work instilled in him a love of fieldwork and an abiding interest in "plain people" and, more generally, in communities with life styles deviating from established norms.
Conclusion of the Korean War led to a major reduction of the pool of junior army officers, enabling Schwartzberg, by then a 1st lieutenant, to accept an early overseas discharge.
During this year he met Monique Ribaux, a Swiss medical lab technician working for the malaria eradication program of the World Health Organization.
The atlas project took much longer than anticipated, entailing numerous research grants, and requiring roughly 85 person-years of work from a multi-disciplinary team of specialists.
Apart from offering advice in planning the work, he was asked to write an article on the traditional cartographies of South Asia, a subject on which there was then virtually no extant literature.
However, years of research in South Asia and neighboring regions – in libraries, museums and private art collections, as well as in the field – uncovered a vastly larger corpus of cartographic and cosmographic artifacts than one might have anticipated.
Schwartzberg's additional writing in his years at Minnesota (1964-2000) took numerous forms: scores of book reviews, essays in political geography, editorials on contemporary issues and events, numerous articles on the Kashmir dispute, work on folk regions in South Asia, a short monograph relating to the history of exploration, various spin-offs from his work on the history of cartography, and major contributions to several encyclopedias, including the lengthy article on the “Physical and Human Geography [of India]” for the 15th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on whose advisory board he subsequently served.
He conducted interviews, on both sides of the Indo-Pakistani line of control, with a wide range of political actors (UN personnel, civil administrators, military officers, party leaders, dissidents [some in hiding], businessmen, journalists, victims of violence, and others).
While his tours in 1993 and 1994 were largely self-financed, that of 1997 was as part of a fact-finding team sponsored by and drawn from the Kashmir Study Group (KSG), a think tank made up mainly of scholars and retired diplomats, established in 1996 by Farooq Kathwari, a wealthy Kashmir-American businessman.
Though the published findings and recommendations of the KSG (to which Schwartzberg was a principal contributor), were widely discussed in diplomatic circles in South Asia, North America and Europe, hawkish nationalistic spoilers ultimately prevented their adoption.
His participation at the 1992 Rio Summit Conference on the Environment and Development, for example, was followed by extensive travel in South America; and his atlas presentation at the Canberra meeting of the International Congress of Orientalists in 1971 was combined with visits to a number of Pacific Island nations.
Intermittently, Schwartzberg served as a consultant to numerous governmental and scholarly agencies in India, the United States and Canada and as a member of selection committees for various academic awards.
In recognition of his scholarly achievements the Department of Geography nominated Schwartzberg in 1995 and in 1996 for a highly competitive Regents Professorship, the highest academic honor that the University of Minnesota can bestow.
On campus, he served as Chair of the Department of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, as an elected representative in the University Senate and in the Assembly of the College of Liberal Arts, and as a member of innumerable committees.
He chaired WFA's Policy and Recommendations Committee for several years prior to the establishment of CGS in 2004 and for the following decade was especially active in the World Federalist Institute, a CGS-affiliated think tank.
In 1996 Schwartzberg was one of the handful of activists who founded the Minnesota Alliance of Peacemakers, which has since grown into an umbrella institution with roughly eighty peace and justice organizational members.
He expanded his advocacy of the latter idea in a monograph published in 2004 by the World Federalist Movement – Institute for Global Policy, Revitalizing the United Nations System: Reform through Weighted Voting.
[4][5][6] That work provides a comprehensive set of proposals for moving away from the Westphalian paradigm of unfettered state sovereignty on which the present system of global governance is predicated.
In December 2014, Schwartzberg established The Workable World Trust, the principal purpose of which is to disseminate and promote the many global governance proposals in his most recent book, with provision to carry on that work after his demise.
The trust has negotiated translations of the book into Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Russian and Spanish, thereby facilitating virtually worldwide discussion of its reform recommendations.
The World Federalist Movement, the Berlin-based Democracy Without Borders, the Brussels-based Center for United Nations Constitutional Research), and provided travel support for youth participation at the Ventotene Seminar in Italy and a Model UN program in Mexico City.
Management of the trust is shared mainly with the extraordinarily efficient Nancy Dunlavy, who took over the directorship in December 2017, when Schwartzberg formally assumed the title of director emeritus.
He hopes that his work and that of the Workable Word Trust – which will outlive him – will contribute significantly toward the achievement of that goal and encourage others to join in the struggle to bring it to fruition.